Based on a true story, Save the Cinema is the kind of plucky underdog feelgood slop that the British film industry churns out on a regular basis, largely to the indifference of audiences. It tells of a small Welsh community that bands together to save their listed art deco cinema (which also doubles as the home for the local youth theatre) from shifty developers who want to pull it down and build a mall.
It’s an Ealing-alike gentle comedy populated by lovable eccentrics, and in Samantha Morton and Jonathan Pryce punches considerably above its weight in terms of casting. But the film-making decisions – from a score that sounds as though it was borrowed from an advertisement for life insurance, to the toffee and treacle colour palette, to a screenplay that is amiable, inoffensive but rarely funny – suggest that perhaps the cinema wasn’t worth saving after all.
In cinemas and on Sky Home Cinema
